10 Critical Reflection as Research Methodology

Doing Criminological Research

10 CRITICAL REFLECTION ASRESEARCH METHODOLOGY

Contributors: Victor JuppPamela DaviesPeter FrancisPrint Pub. Date: 2000Print ISBN: 9781848606531Online ISBN: 9780857024404DOI: 10.4135/9780857024404Print pages: 175-189

This PDF has been generated from SAGE Research Methods. Please note that thepagination of the online version will vary from the pagination of the print book.

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Page 2 of 20 Doing Criminological Research: 10 CRITICALREFLECTION AS RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

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10 CRITICAL REFLECTION ASRESEARCH METHODOLOGY

Contents

• The need for critical criminology• Ideology critique: the legacy of the Frankfurt School

• Ideology studies• Levels of analysis

• Standpoint epistemology• The critical project in the new millennium

• Analysing sentencing patterns of young burglars• Conclusion• Suggested readings• References

The need for critical criminology

Many of the questions with which criminology is concerned are best served by empiricalinquiry, whether qualitative or quantitative, positivistic or interpretive. Criminologistsengage in research to find answers to questions about why people commit crimes; whysocieties have higher crime rates at some times than at others; why some apparentlysimilar societies have different crime rates; and what kinds of strategies and techniquesare effective in preventing or reducing crime. These are crucial questions, and theresearch methods described elsewhere in this book are well-proven means of finding atleast some of the answers.

There are, however, some other important questions which cannot be addressed bythese means, but need the sort of approach generally understood as critical socialscience. Crime and punishment are intensely political and moral issues, and thereare key questions that criminology needs to engage with which concern the moral

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and political stances taken towards crime and punishment by particular societies atparticular times. Some examples of the sorts of question I have in mind that are ofcontemporary interest include the following:

• Given criminological understandings of the links between crime and relativedeprivation, and between high crime rates and high degrees of socialinequality, why do governments not do more to reduce social inequality?

• In view of the links demonstrated by criminologists between crime andcertain forms of masculinity, why are policies such as regimes for youngoffenders which emphasize physical fitness, combat skills and otherattributes of ‘machismo’ masculinity, pursued instead of penalties which offeropportunities for acquiring more caring skills and values?

• Since research has long established that reoffending rates afterimprisonment are worse than for comparative community penalties, why dogovernments pursue ‘prison works’ policies?

• Crimes such as the killing of James Bulger by two young boys are, thankfully,extremely rare, so why was this incident allowed to influence policy towardsyoung offenders in general?

• Since attempts to predict who will become criminals among cohorts of youngpeople do not have a good success record, why are prediction studies stillthe form of criminological theory that is most influential among politicians andpolicy-makers?

• Why have theories which emphasize the basic similarity between offendersand non-offenders to a large extent been displaced by theories whichemphasize differences between criminals and non-criminals? Labellingtheory, for example, which insisted on the normality of ‘primary deviance’,influenced the emergence of policies such as cautioning and intermediatetreatment in the 1980s. In the 1990s, underclass and newly respectablesocio-biographical theories which demonstrate that ‘offenders really aredifferent’, underpin strategies of exclusion and ‘tough justice’.

These are questions of the politics of law and order, rather than empirical questionsof causation or evaluation, and necessitate understanding the political-social contextin which policy-making takes place. They also involve reflexive consideration ofcriminology's own role in relation to the exercise of power in society.



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Practically, criminology needs to understand the political context in which it operatesin order to have some idea of when it is likely to be influential, and to assess whatstrategies will be needed in order to get its message across. Morally, reflexiveconsideration is needed in order to be able to anticipate some of the likely effects ofthe production of knowledge about crime and crime control. For example, at a timewhen the politics of law and order is producing a vast increase in the numbers of peopleincarcerated, for longer periods, in more austere conditions, criminologies which linkcrime to various ‘subordinated masculinities’ are likely to be drawn upon rhetorically tolegitimize the jailing of more men, ‘particularly men of color’ (Chesney-Lind and Bloom,1997). This is a problem I feel very conscious of as a teacher of criminological theory:the most progressive and plausible theories are being developed in a social contextwhich is all too likely to use them in vulgarized, piecemeal ways as part of a politicizedconstruction of the criminal as ‘alien other’.

Criminology is part of the apparatus of control in modern societies (Hudson, 1997:452). Criminologists are engaged in the production of knowledge to help the workof police, probation officers, prison governors, forensic psychiatrists, communitysafety officers and other criminal justice practitioners, as well as politicians and policy-makers (Garland, 1985, 1988). As Foucault has shown, criminology is at the service ofpower; it is part of the technologies of power. The stance of the detached researcherproducing ‘objective’ or even ‘subversive’ knowledge has been well described as an‘elaborate alibi to justify the exercise of power’ (Cohen, 1988: 5). Of all the appliedsocial sciences, criminology has the most dangerous relationship to power: thecategories and classifications, the labels and diagnoses and the images of the criminalproduced by criminologists are stigmatizing and pejorative. The strategies of controland punishment which utilize those conceptions have implications for the life-chances,for the opportunities freely to move around our cities, and for the rights and liberties, ofthose to whom they are applied.

Awareness of the political uses of criminological knowledge does not mean that allresearch into the causes of crime or the effectiveness of punishment and controlstrategies is to be avoided because of its possible moral and political implications;but it does mean that criminology is very much in need of a stream of critical researchwhich exposes the political contexts in which criminological knowledge production isembedded.



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Criminology, then, needs a body of research which can investigate the political/socialcontext in which policy-oriented knowledge is produced, and which can engage inreflexive consideration of its own theoretical products (Nelken, 1994). The question nowis, how to go about such reflexive consideration? Specifically, how to go about suchreflexive consideration in a manner which will produce something that looks like ‘proper’research, rather than the mere anecdotal and pessimistic or cynical denial of thevalue of any empirical criminology? Similarly how to avoid what has been termed ‘leftimpossibilism’, where any penal reform or innovation is seen as yet another instanceof the widening mesh of control and repression? Then there are questions of how toselect between different criminological perspectives; how to deal with media, politicaland professional accounts of crime and criminal justice.

The first step is to be clear about the object of inquiry. The kind of critical reflectionthat criminology needs to be engaged in is the investigation of the power/knowledgecomplex in which criminology has its existence. The object of investigation is thecluster of theories, policies, legislation, media treatments, roles and institutions that areconcerned with crime, and with the control and punishment of crime. This material is theobject of study, not part of the explanation.

The second step is to give specific, theorized, meaning to the idea of ‘critical reflection’.This means choosing a theoretical perspective as carefully as one would choose amethod of data collection in empirical research. Choosing between different sets oftheories and concepts is equivalent to choosing between qualitative and quantitativemethods, pre-coded questionnaires and semi-structured interviews. Research that isconcerned with these topics is generally described as ‘critical criminology’.

Within the broad heading of critical criminology there are several different approaches,some of the most influential being critical theory using the concepts and methodsassociated with the ‘Frankfurt School’ of social research; ‘discourse’ research usingthe ideas and methods associated with Michel Foucault; and standpoint research,developed particularly by feminist writers. There is considerable overlap between theseperspectives, and they are mainly distinguished by the precise definition of their objectof study, and by their commitment to certain political values. Frankfurt School researchconcentrated on culture and ideology in authoritarian societies, drawing on Marxistand psychoanalytic concepts; Foucault investigated the exercise of power in liberal



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societies, foregrounding the development and influence of the human/social sciences,drawing on a range of political and philosophical ideas and using a characteristicallyFrench ‘snapshot’ historical method; feminists have replaced the centrality of conceptssuch as ‘class’ and ‘liberalism’ with patriarchy and gender divisions. What the threeapproaches have in common is a commitment to research which contributes to theemancipation of those who are repressed by existing social and power relations.

Deconstructionist and postmodernist research of the kind that has become influentialin cultural studies and other humanities fields has begun to appear in criminology (Lea,1998), but is not yet so prominent as it is in related fields such as socio-legal studies.

Ideology critique: the legacy of the FrankfurtSchool

The term ‘critical theory’ is used first and foremost to describe the work of a group ofscholars attached to the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research in the 1930s, someof whom went to the USA and elsewhere during the second world war, and someof whom stayed in Germany. After the war the Institute was reconstituted and asecond generation of critical theorists, the most famous of whom is Jürgen Habermas,continued the work. Among the first generation of Frankfurt School writers, the bestknown among sociologists are probably Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin and HerbertMarcuse.

As (mainly) Jewish scholars in Nazi Germany, they not surprisingly set aboutinvestigating the rise of the Fascist state. Their studies focused on themes such as thedevelopment of the authoritarian personality (Adorno); the displacement of a liberalaesthetic in culture (Benjamin) and the rise of a politics of repression (Marcuse). Theseare obviously all themes which have relevance to aspects of law and order politics,especially changes from tolerant to repressive penal policies, and to changing imagesof offenders from the deprived to the depraved. The central problematic for the criticaltheorists’ various inquiries are the conditions of possibility for the rise of authoritarianideologies and regimes.



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In some ways, the British left realists are important representatives of the tradition ofcritical criminology. Left realists such as Jock Young and his colleagues seek to replaceideological views of the causes of crime and the policies and practices that wouldhave a reasonable likelihood of success in reducing crime by real – in Marxist terms,scientific – understandings (Young, 1997). The appropriate methodology is thus to startwith replacing socially constructed data, such as recorded crime statistics, with datagained from victim surveys: documenting people's real experiences of crime rather thanaccepting documents shaped by the considerations of officialdom. Theorizing can thenproceed from real rather than ideologically glossed information.

The critical criminology with which I am concerned here, however, seeks not toreplace ideologies of crime and punishment with ‘real’ understandings, but to study theideologies themselves. Examples of the kind of work I have in mind are the studies ofthe development of ‘new racism’ carried out by Paul Gilroy and colleagues at the Centrefor Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham, and analyses ofthe development of ‘tough’ tactics towards inner-city crime in the late 1980s, usingparamilitary-style policing, harsher sentencing, and calls from politicians for lessunderstanding and more punishment (Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, 1982;Scraton, 1987). These studies have drawn on critical theory's traditions of ideologycritique, and on concepts such as populism and authoritarianism which arose inthe Frankfurt School's research on Fascism and on pre-war USA, applying them tocontemporary societies.

Ideology studies

These ideology investigations usually start by focusing on one particular manifestationof law and order politics which seems to signal some sort of changing ideology. Inthe studies of the criminalization of black youth in the late 1970s and the 1980s, Hall,Gilroy and other writers within the same perspective started by highlighting concreteexamples of what appeared to be ideological innovation. In Policing the Crisis, StuartHall and his co-authors centre on the adoption of the term ‘mugging’ by the Britishpress (Hall et al., 1978). They show how this term was brought across the Atlantic,used by a single newspaper and then quickly taken up by other elements of the tabloidpress before appearing in broadsheet papers and more reflective television and radio



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programmes, and gradually entering into the discourse of politicians and criminal justiceprofessionals, including criminologists. Gilroy and his colleagues highlight one particulardocument in similar fashion, in their case the police training booklet Shades of Grey(Gilroy, 1982). Analysis of first and second editions of this manual revealed a shiftfrom seeing the ‘black youth/crime problem’ in very similar ways to the ‘white youth/crime problem’, that is, first as a problem of a few young troublemakers disrupting agenerally law-abiding community, then moving to a view of black communities as moregenerally lawless and anti-authority. As happened after the appearance of stories aboutthe involvement of Afro-Caribbean youth in ‘mugging’, a criminal, police-hating blackcommunity comes to be seen more widely as something that has to be dealt with inpolicy and in theory. Ideologies of race and criminality mean that ‘black criminality’ asa growing and serious problem is accorded a reality in the Durkheimian sense that it isreal in its consequences for black people and for styles of policing, even if its empiricalexistence is open to considerable controversy.

Analysis then typically proceeds by finding other examples of similar ideologicalphenomena, so that the investigator may be sure that there is really somethingsignificant occurring, rather than just an isolated incident that might not berepresentative of any general trend. In the case of the development of ideologies ofracism and criminality, further examples cited by the Centre for Contemporary CulturalStudies authors included Enoch Powell's ‘rivers of blood’ speech, parliamentary debateson immigration and the consequent tightening of immigration laws, and the continuingtrend of criminalization of black communities as demonstrated by the introduction ofthe notorious ‘sus’ laws, later repealed but quickly replaced by new stop-and-searchpowers, and the development of confrontational styles of policing based on the ideas ofno-go areas and disorder ‘hot spots’.

This is not the place to reproduce the analysis that these researchers developed, whichcan be read in the works cited and others by the same and associated authors; thepoint is to note the method of gathering examples which together demonstrate the clearemergence of a new racist ideology. The imagery of the black man or woman in the1970s changed from that of the hardworking, respectable family person who had comein the 1950s and 1960s in response to recruitment campaigns for labour for shortageoccupations such as nursing and bus driving, to the stereotyping of second generationAfro-Caribbeans as criminal and disorderly (Pitts, 1993). An outbreak of disturbances



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in areas with high proportions of Afro-Caribbean residents in 1981 was interpreted interms of this established official view of black communities as lawless, and the ideologyof black criminality became further entrenched and augmented (Solomos, 1993).

Levels of analysis

Having gathered a series of examples that establish the existence of the phenomenato be understood – ‘new racist’ ideology which has at its core a criminalization ofblack communities – critical reflection attempts to explain the emergent ideology byprogressing through a series of analytic levels. The first of these levels is criminological.What has criminology to say about the naming and stigmatizing of events and people,and of pejorative generalization from a few isolated events to depiction of a wholesocial group – Afro-Caribbeans, or ‘youth’ – as criminal, disorderly or anti-social? Theauthors of Policing the Crisis drew first of all on Stanley Cohen's account of ‘folk devilsand moral panics’ (Cohen, 1972). This work described the way in which bank holidayclashes between ‘mods’ and ‘rockers’ were sensationalized and generalized, and sogenerated a ‘moral panic’ about supposed new levels of anti-social behaviour amongyoung people. The dynamics of the media treatment of a relatively minor incident at anEssex seaside resort led to massive police operations to keep mods and rockers apart.In Brighton, anyone who arrived by train in anything resembling mod or rocker clothingwas prevented from leaving the station and entering the town. All of this was similarto the press handling of the first reported incident of ‘mugging’. Cohen's ‘folk devilsand moral panics’ analysis itself drew on existing criminological perspectives such aslabelling and deviance amplification, and provided the first layer of theory for Hall andhis co-authors.

The next step in critical reflection is to connect the criminological level with the relevantstrand of wider social theory, and it is this step in particular which much empirical,mainstream criminology does not take. It is for this next, more abstract and theoretical,level of analysis that the conceptual resources of critical theory were drawn upon.Critical theory uses a basically Marxist framework for understanding ideology and thestate, situating itself in the Gramscian tradition, with prominence given to ideas suchas hegemonic dominance of the ideologies of the powerful. This is especially relevantfor understanding the power of racist ideologies, for they work precisely through the



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persuasion of powerless white groups that problems such as unemployment, lackof housing, inadequate schools in inner-city areas, etc., are attributable to blackimmigrants straining resources by their excessive numbers and undermining traditionalcommunities by the intrusion of their ‘alien’ culture. Racist ideologies may be generatedby speeches made by the powerful, but they are carried and perpetuated throughbecoming part of the world-view of the powerless.

In the 1980s, the critical criminological project was primarily concerned with explainingthe intensification of criminalization and repression of groups who were perceivedby those in power as posing a threat to social and political order. The examples thatwere foregrounded included the use of criminal rather than civil proceedings andparamilitary policing methods against protest groups in the UK such as the strikingminers and the women demonstrating against the presence of American cruise missilesat Greenham Common in Berkshire. Other examples of state repression of groupswho were seen as potential threats to the social order include progressive restriction ofentitlement to benefit for unemployed young people, the reactivation of ancient laws toprosecute people living on the streets and the destruction of their makeshift shelters.The ‘criminalization of poverty’, the ‘criminalization of dissent’ and the apparent shiftof policing priorities from crime to disorder were examples of the new ideology whichselected an ever-widening number of groups for categorization as ‘the enemy within’alongside minority ethnic groups.

Again, the methodology of critical reflection was to select examples to establish theexistence of an ideological phenomenon, and to enlist criminological theory and thenwider social theory to help explain the emergence of the ideology and its manifestationsin policy and practice. Among several criminological themes that appeared to offersome insight into the criminalization of groups as apparently diverse as strikers,women peace campaigners and the impoverished young, Steven Box's use of thepower-threat hypothesis was useful and relevant. According to this hypothesis, staterepression will be directed not at the criminal per se, but at subordinated groupswho are perceived (accurately or not) as likely to pose a threat to existing politicalorder and power arrangements (Box, 1983, 1987). This thesis originated in the USA,where it was formulated as an explanation of state and regional differences in black-white imprisonment rates. The rate differentials did not seem to conform to either theproportion of African-Americans or Hispanics in the populations, or the crime rates



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of the ethnic groups in the different states or regions, but seemed better to correlatewith the level of political challenge or threat which appeared to be posed by the groups(Hawkins and Hardy, 1989). Transposed to a British context, the hypothesis seemedto provide at least the beginnings of an explanation for facts such as that the levels ofpolice resourcing between the various counties and forces did not correspond to crimerates, but did correlate more closely with levels of disorder and unrest. According tothe power-threat hypothesis, the more a dominant group perceives a potential threatto its power or well-being from subordinated groups, the more likely are three forms ofdiscrimination:

2. 1. restriction of political rights;4. 2. symbolic forms of segregation;6. 3. threat-oriented ideology. (Hudson, 1993: 86)

These three forms of discrimination certainly appeared to be directed against powerlessand marginalized groups depicted as ‘the enemy within’ in the late 1980s.

Once disorder rather than crime had been seen as the driving force of criminalizationand repression in the mid-1980s, developments such as the importation of paramilitarypolicing methods, adopted to deal with the troubles in Northern Ireland, to mainlandBritain, were easy to fit into the analysis (Jefferson, 1990). Coercive policing methodswere also discussed by British left realist criminologists; indeed, the need for moreeven-handed and more accountable police practices has been one of the principalpolitical arguments advanced by realist criminologists (Lea and Young, 1984; Young,1997). Again, though, the difference between realist criminology and the strandof critical criminology being discussed here is that while realists are urging thereplacement of one style of policing by another, critical criminologists (although theirpreferences as to policing styles would no doubt be the same as those of the realists)are engaged in analysing the ideologically driven practices of paramilitary, coercivepolicing and the ideologies themselves which give rise to those practices.

Moving from the criminological level to the level of wider social theory, once againcontemporary theories of ideology were developed and used which were rooted in theconceptual constructs of critical theory. Societies such as the UK and USA were, asStuart Hall described them, ‘drifting into a law and order society’ (Hall, 1980), in which



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unemployment, homelessness, poverty and social dissent were recast as problemsof crime. Instead of worrying about the problems that were faced by the unemployed,the homeless or badly housed, the poor, the addicted and the migrant, we worriedabout the ‘crime problem’ they posed for respectable citizens. Thus preventing socialsecurity fraud was given a higher priority than combating poverty; restricting ‘illegal’ or‘economic’ immigration was given priority over assisting refugees.

Critical theory ideas such as ‘authoritarianism’, ‘populism’ and ‘the exceptional state’were used to explain the growth of these repressive and criminalizing elements of1980s ideologies. Thatcher and Reagan were, it was pointed out, engaged in populistappeals over the head of professionals, appealing directly to the same instincts ofpopular uncertainty and resentment that the purveyors of new racism had appealedto a decade before, so that the difficulties of mass unemployment, capital flight andinner-city decay were blamed not on the defects of rootless late capitalism, but on thevery people who suffered most from these conditions. ‘Scroungers’, ‘yobs’ and ‘singlemothers’ were blamed for the country's ills, and those who sought to support them, suchas teachers and social workers, were derided and demoralized.

Hall's analysis of ‘authoritarian populism’ as the ideological underpinning of theThatcher-Reagan era was augmented by studies of the dominant economic ideologyof the times. Andrew Gamble's work The Free Economy and the Strong State (1988)struck chords with many critical criminologists. Gamble pointed out that the right-wing monetarism of the 1980s was a hands-off, laissez-faire ideology. Governmentintervention in the economy was seen as dangerous, and undesirable; the catchphraseof the times was ‘Let the markets decide.’ Such proscription of government action overan enormous sphere of social-political life obviously posed problems for politicianssuch as Thatcher who wished to be seen as strong leaders. An area of social lifewas therefore dramatized, and designated as the sphere where strong, vigorouspolitical intervention was necessary, and crime was ‘it’. A war on poverty would involveeconomic interventionism, but a war on crime involved moral interventionism andthus filled the political action vacuum perfectly. Financial deregulation of the City wasaccompanied by ever more rigorous and coercive regulation of the inner city (Hudson,1995).



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As the 1980s turned into the 1990s, a new element was added to this critical analysisof the war on crime by the ending of the cold war, which had implications for the social-political response to crime. Critical criminologists had already commented on theimportation of paramilitary policing techniques from Northern Ireland to the mainlandwhen a former chief of the Royal Ulster Constabulary became head of London'sMetropolitan Police. With the ending of the cold war, the substitution of domestic crimeand disorder for foreign and colonial struggles escalated.

Criminologists such as Nils Christie have drawn on Marcuse's analysis of the military-industrial complex to show the extent of the growth of the corrections complex(Christie, 1993). Companies such as Marconi, which traditionally manufactured militaryequipment, turned their production capacities to control technology such as electronictagging equipment, surveillance equipment and so forth, while prisons and privatesecurity patrols became growth areas of employment both for those affected by thedecline of traditional industries and for ex-military personnel. There is now, argue criticalcriminologists, an economic demand for crime, just as there has traditionally beenan economic demand for periodic wars: the war on crime gives the military-industrialcomplex a new lease of life.

Standpoint epistemology

As well as theories of ideology, an important legacy of critical theory is the theory ofknowledge which has come to be known as ‘standpoint epistemology’. The FrankfurtSchool argued that the goal of positivistic social science – the creation of ‘objective’,value-free knowledge, following the methodology of the natural sciences – is unrealistic.For critical research, since standpoint is inevitable, it had better be overt. Ratherthan pretend to objectivity, critical theorists face squarely the ‘whose side are we on’questions posed in the 1960s by sociologists such as Becker (1967) and Gouldner(1968).

Critical criminology is largely engaged with the question of the impact of ideologies andtheir practices on those on the downside of power relations. An important feature ofcritical criminology, then, is that it is linked to campaigns on behalf of the powerless,such as prisoners’ rights campaigns (Sim, 1994). Critical criminology has espoused



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the standpoint of minority ethnic groups, of the poor and marginalized and, of course,women.

One of the most fruitful of criminological encounters has been between (mostlymale) critical criminologists, and feminist criminologists who have raised issues ofmasculinity and male violence. Campaigning against violence against women doesnot signify abandonment of the standpoint of the powerless: on the contrary, oneof the main arguments of feminist authors who have urged that the criminologicalspotlight should fall on domestic and sexual violence has been that even when suchcrimes are committed by people who are economically disadvantaged in relation tosociety in general, such people are exercising power within the crime relationship. Theinfluence of feminist concerns has, therefore, led to reassessment of exactly who arethe powerless, when we are thinking about crime (Dobash and Dobash, 1992; Hudson,1998a; Kelly and Radford, 1987; Stanko, 1985, 1990).

Feminist criminologists have posed powerful challenges to all the streams and traditionsin criminology, and there has been much debate between feminist criminologiststhemselves. I am not attempting to encompass all the different feminist perspectiveswithin criminology, but merely to demonstrate that the standpoint of ‘woman’ hasbeen one of the most powerful and richly developed standpoint epistemologies withincritical criminology. The methodology of standpoint feminism has been describedin various texts (see, for example, Cain, 1990; Harding, 1987), and been put to usein investigations of female criminality and the punishment of females. The work ofPat Carlen has been particularly important in this context since it combines clarityof discussion about method and the relationship of her work to other criminologicaltraditions, with an illuminating empirically based understanding of the lives of womenwho commit crime and are entangled with the criminal justice system (Carlen, 1990,1992, 1998).

The method of feminist standpoint criminology involves ‘asking the woman question’ –that is asking how patterns of crime, penal policies, crime prevention and communitysafety strategies, ideologies of law and order, or indeed criminological theories,affect women. It uses feminist consciousness – following research strategies thatare concerned with the problems faced by women, and which are aimed to reduceoppression in women's lives. Feminist critical criminology exemplifies the traditional



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commitment of critical theory to acknowledging standpoints and having political/practicalas well as theoretical objectives.

In recent years, postmodernism has posed a challenge not only to realist criminology,but also to this kind of critical standpoint criminology (Cohen, 1998; Lea, 1988).Feminist standpoint epistemology has been at the forefront of the debate betweencritical and postmodernist criminology, and has taken seriously the question of whethera single standpoint ‘woman’ is a valid basis for theoretical inquiry (Cain, 1990; Smart,1990). A rapprochement between feminism and postmodernism can be found in thework of Daly, who has argued for the development of race-gender-class perspectives(Daly, 1993; Daly and Stephens, 1995), and by Carlen, who says that the prime referentis contingent on the question at issue (Carlen, 1998). Sometimes gender will be thestarting point for an investigation; sometimes the starting point will be race or ethnicity,or poverty or some other quality.

Whilst Daly and Carlen are feminists who have responded to the challenge ofpostmodernism, Alison Young could perhaps be described as a feminist postmodernist.In her work she has not only ‘asked the woman question’ and used feministconsciousness in selecting research topics and in forming her understandings, but shehas also challenged the ideological nature and the epistemological validity of emergingcriminological standpoints such as that of ‘victim’ (Young, 1990, 1996; Young and Rush,1994). The point of agreement between postmodernist and other critical criminologies isthat critical criminology does not propose a single, unitary identity on which all researchshould be based, but insists that all research should acknowledge its standpoint, andthat standpoint scholarship should be on the side of the oppressed in the situation inquestion.

The critical project in the new millennium

In the late 1990s and into the new century, critical criminologists continue to engagewith the politics of law and order. Two themes have emerged as major critical projects.First, understanding the apparent reversal from the rational penal policy that soughtto reserve imprisonment for the most serious offences that emerged in the late 1980sand was enacted in the 1991 Criminal Justice Act, to the ‘get tough’, ‘prison works’



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policies of the 1993 Criminal Justice Act and the 1996 Crime (Sentences) Act. Second,criminologists are engaged in trying to understand the nature of the changes that seemto be taking place in the relative roles of the state, local communities and agencies, andthe individual in relation to crime and community safety.

Work focusing on the first of these themes follows the familiar methodology of lookingat pieces of legislation, speeches, and other ideological outputs, and decoding themwithin the analytic framework of state ideologies. Anthony Bottoms’ account of theundermining of managerial rationalism by ‘populist punitiveness’ is an excellentand widely respected example of work which attempts to understand this change inlegislative tone between 1991 and 1993 (Bottoms, 1995). Another good example isRichard Sparks’ work on ‘austere regimes’ in prisons (Sparks, 1996). Work is alsoin process which is analysing the way in which the ‘get tough’ populism of MichaelHoward's time as Home Secretary is being carried forward by New Labour and itsequally tough Home Secretary, Jack Straw (Brownlee, 1998).

Some of the current work is also reflexive, analysing the contribution of criminologicaltheory itself to the present politics of law and order. The American criminologistJonathon Simon points out that victim surveys have contributed to the penal politicsof the 1990s: it was not until national victimization surveys began to be undertaken,he argues, that the crime rate became an object of public discourse, and an objectof criminological and policy intervention (Simon, 1996). As well as victim surveys, hesays, the major contribution of criminology to penal policy (and therefore to ‘get tough’penal politics) in the 1980s has been research to identify persistent offenders. Thiswork is certainly the most influential form of criminology in the UK at present. Becauseidentification as a likely repeat offender leads to such severe penal consequences (longperiods of imprisonment, extended supervision on release), this ‘prediction criminology’prompts in acute form the concern that criminology should incorporate a reflexiveacknowledgement of its role in constituting the criminal as ‘other’ (Nelken, 1994).

Simon's work does not use the language of state ideology critique, but draws onconcepts developed by Michel Foucault in his later work on governance in modernsocieties (Burchell et al., 1991; Foucault, 1980). Although he has commented on the‘get tough’ policies of the 1990s (the paper cited above is a commentary on the ‘threestrikes’ legislation in California), the main aim of Simon's work has been to show a



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reconfiguration in society's engagement with crime, away from a concern with punishingand blaming the individual, and towards managing risk and aggregate crime rates. Thisproject of understanding changing ‘master patterns’ of control, the second major themeof contemporary critical criminology, is associated in Britain with the work of Cohen(1985) and, most recently, with David Garland (1996). The main thrust of the work ofCohen, Garland and Simon is to show the criminological/penal effects of the emergenceof what social theorists have called the ‘risk society’ (Beck, 1990).

Analysing sentencing patterns of youngburglars

I have drawn on this work in my own recent attempts to understand penal developmentsin the late 1990s, in which I have looked at the sentencing patterns of young burglars.In the 1980s, burglary was seen as a non-violent, property offence, and as suchwas on the non-prison track: burglars were viewed as suitable for punishment in thecommunity. Much innovation went into developing effective community penaltiesfor young burglars: offence-focused groups, intensive intermediate treatment andvarious day-centre programmes concentrated especially on gaining the confidence ofmagistrates and judges to use the projects as alternatives to custody. Burglary wasseen as on the proportionality side of the twin track, with violent and sexual crimes onthe ‘risk’ track, where imprisonment can be for longer than usual periods to reflect therisk of reoffending. In the latter half of the 1980s the imprisonment rate for burglarydropped by 10 per cent. Since 1993, the language of ‘risk’ has become ever moreprevalent, and burglary has been seen less as a non-violent offence, and more as anoffence with a high risk of reoffending. A consequence of this shift of penal focus is thatthe imprisonment rate for burglary was more than 20 per cent higher in 1996 than in1992.

My method in attempting to understand the changes in imprisonment rates for burglarywas that of critical reflection: seeking to explain a phenomenon by reference to a bodyof relevant theory. The point is not to establish or demonstrate that the sentencingof young burglars has changed, but to explain these changes in the context of newpenal strategies. These strategies are themselves consequent upon twists and turns



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in the politics of law and order, twists and turns which reflect not only current politicalexpediencies but also wider and deeper political shifts. This is what was earlierdescribed as moving between levels of analysis. I went about this interpretation ofchanging sentencing patterns by starting with the figures, and moving through differentexplanatory levels, from official explanations through to wider social theories, lookingat ideological moves from justice to risk and from inclusion to exclusion which reflectthe transition from the certainties of modernism to the insecurities of late- or post-modernism. The movement between levels of analysis can be portrayed as follows:



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Conclusion

Other criminologists who are attempting to understand the changing nature of theapproach to crime and the control of crime in the 1990s and 2000s, have highlightedthe increasing fragmentation of powers to control and prevent crime. Writers such asGarland and Simon, and O'Malley (1996) have drawn on the body of work known as the‘history of the present’ writing to demonstrate the fit between Foucault's post-Disciplineand Punish work on governance, and contemporary developments in crime control



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(Garland, 1997; Hudson, 1998b; O'Malley, 1996). Garland, Sparks (1996) and myselfhave written about the value of this ‘governmentality’ history of the present literature forcriminology, and have pointed to the continuing need for critical criminology to draw onwider social theory if it is to understand the politics of law and order, emerging shifts indiscourses about crime and punishment, and if it is to have a reflexive conscience aboutits own contribution to the technologies of power. There is nothing new about all this:critical criminology is defined by its engagement with wider social theories; it is definedby its transgression of the narrow bounds of mainstream criminology which accepts thegivens of official definitions of crime and official strategies for control of crime (Cohen,1998).

Engagement with wider social theories does not mean that any off-the-peg theory willdo: choice of theoretical framework depends on the project in hand, and theoreticalchoices will follow a kind of homoeopathic logic. Investigation of ideologies will drawon theories which have ideological critique as their object of analysis; the influenceon crime control and penal strategies of changing forms of governance will draw uponsocial theory which is concerned with changing governmental rationalities. What isconstant in critical theory is an awareness and acknowledgement of standpoints, and anexplicit commitment to values of social justice and human rights.

Suggested readings

10.4135/9780857024404.d127



Documents

10 Critical Reflection as Research Methodology